Royal with cheese: A King’s Quest primer | Polygon. We weren’t allowed to have a console as kids (I had to sneak in Mario time at a friend’s house) but we did have a PC so I grew up playing King’s Quest and Space Quest games. Me and Sierra were besties.

Discovering The Small Miracle Of The Soup Dumpling | KUNC. I think the first time I heard about soup dumplings it was from Megnut and since then I moved to Seattle and Din Tai Fung has two (always packed) restaurants here. My favorite, though are at Long’s in Vancouver, BC. More tasting needs to be done!

Aladdin: When Chaos Comes Calling Episode Trivia – TV.com. Under “allusions” here they describe a scene with a whale and a bowl of petunias which is a reference to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The moment lasts seconds and it’s over and when I saw it as a kid I nearly thought I’d imagined it. Glad to finally have confirmation that it was real.

The Enduring Paint-on-the-Face Mystery | Best Of MetaFilter. A while back somebody posed a question to Ask Metafilter which was essentially: do you remember the opening credits of an 80s/90s sitcom where Person A ends up accidentally rollering paint over Person B’s face? And yes, everybody remembers that. I remember that. But collectively we cannot find any proof of this actually existing. It’s fascinating!

The Price of Nice Nails – NYTimes.com. I recently found a nail place whose owner is the sole employee as well. It’s popular and can be hard to get a same day appointment there but it makes me feel good knowing that I’m not unknowingly participating in any unfair trade.

Volunteer work for loners | Ask MetaFilter. Lots and lots of options for making the world a better place while not, you know, dealing with other humans. I will say that I worked as a page in my local library system when I was in high school and it was both a decently paying job and one with minimal social contact. I find myself cringing at the idea that somebody who can work for free could have taken away that job from me, while at the same time my high school self was a listed volunteer with the local parks department. I’m kind of conflicted right now – ?

WIRED Binge-Watching Guide: Scrubs | WIRED. Last winter I watched all eight seasons of Scrubs (I fear that season 9 will throw all my happy fuzzy memories off so I avoided it). It was the perfect comfort watching for when you feel nostalgic for not that long ago.

Game of Thrones Finale Recap: Death Is a Gift | WIRED. This is all spoilers, you’ve been warned. This is a great summary of what happens at the end of Season Five of the Game of Thrones television show compared with the where the story lines are at the end of the fifth book. It’s great if you consume one but not the other and are curious about how they are diverging.

Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves: five thousand years of apocalypse and rebirth – Boing Boing. I absolutely loved this book and spent a few very late nights reading because I couldn’t not know the fate of, well, all of humanity. A lot of reviewers don’t like the amount of technical explanations but I like those here as I liked those in Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon and in Andy Weir’s The Martian. Of all the reviews of Seveneves that I’ve read Cory Doctorow’s here sums up a lot of what I think. Added I also love the perspective of Laura Miller at Salon who wrote of one aspect of surviving in space: “I enjoyed it as the aerospace version of all those how-to passages about maple sugar boiling in “The Little House on the Prairie” books.”

The Jezebel Staff, Perfected. A demonstration of photo editing software that makes people look extra pretty. Its a send up of our overly perfected Instagram age but it kinda sold me on getting one of these apps.

Biang Biang Noodles – The GastroGnome. I had the pleasure of learning how to make dumplings at the dining room table in this video. These noodles look like a project but a very worthy project. And Naomi? That girl knows her noodles. I’m going to try these very soon.

Lifesaver Noodles – With Cabbage & Carrots » delicious:days. I’ve already made this three times and it’s become a recipe I’ll keep around, and it makes very yummy cold leftovers. If I buy cabbage and an onion I can manage to make it with a bunch of those Dorot frozen herbs I’ve talked about before. Napa cabbage is a good substitute for the pointed cabbage in the recipe if you, like me, cannot find pointed cabbage in your usual grocery store.

Fuchsia Dunlop’s Sichuanese Chopped Celery with Beef – The Wednesday Chef. I chose this as a simple option when my cookbook club did a Fuchisia Dunlop book and it very quickly became a go to weeknight dinner in my house. After I had the fancy vinegar and the Sichuan chili bean paste in my pantry (so so good) and some cooked rice in my freezer it turns out that a very tasty dinner is as easy as picking up fresh ground beef and celery at the market. It’s like magic.